173 - One Dream, One World Journeys in Samadhi

Preface: One Dream, One World

    Seattle Reminiscence (Book #170) records in careful detail my journey after immigrating from Taiwan to Seattle, USA. Twenty years passed between my arrival at the age of thirty-eight and my reaching fifty-eight. Looking back now, all the hardships and joys, the circumstances and encounters involved in founding the True Buddha School, seem to have passed in the blink of an eye — truly like a dream. Not only that — upon reflection, everything feels like a dream:

    My elementary school years feel like a dream;

    my junior high school years feel like a dream;

    my high school years feel like a dream;

    my university years feel like a dream;

    my career as a surveying engineer after graduation feels like a dream;

    my married life feels like a dream;raising my children, Fo-Ching and Fo-Chi, feels like a dream;

    watching Fo-Ching earn a doctorate feels like a dream;

    and watching Fo-Chi graduate from a Seattle university feels like a dream.

    In a single flash, everything has passed — truly like a dream.

    At the Jade Emperor Temple, the Golden Mother of the Jade Pond opened my divine eye, and I traveled through the Illusory Realm of the Great Void — wasn’t all of that just a dream? From that moment on, my studies of Taoism, Exoteric Buddhism, and Esoteric Buddhism have likewise been like a dream. Yet I made the great bodhichitta vow:

    Life after life, I will deliver sentient beings.   

    Even if shattered to pieces, I will deliver sentient beings,

    never abandoning a single one.

    This, too, is but a dream.

    In this lifetime, I have passed through the stages of learning the Dharma, propagating the Dharma, wandering as a practitioner, and withdrawing from the world. Today, having just turned sixty, I look back and see that each of these stages — learning the Dharma, propagating the Dharma, wandering as a practitioner, and withdrawing from the world — has been but one grand dream after another.

    Here is a poem:

    In the great dream, within the true abode, not a single dharma exists.

    Yet within this absence of dharma, a thousand distinctions arise.

    Turning back to contemplate one’s own nature, beyond all discrimination — Thought after thought, pure white lotus blossoms unfold.

    Now I live in seclusion at Leaf Lake, grateful for each day I am alive, joyful with each passing day, cultivating myself day by day.

    If you ask me what I practice, I answer: samadhi.

    Within samadhi, I save sentient beings in distress every day.

    I also abide in samadhi, cultivating pure and unbroken mindfulness, seeking liberation from this world of five impurities, aspiring to join the Lotus Ponds Assembly — forever free from all suffering and immersed in boundless joy.

    This book, One Dream, One World, is itself a samadhi, a world.

    Its wondrous yogic correspondences are beyond measure.

    May you, the destineone, encounter this book and read it.

Sheng-Yen Lu

17102NE 40th Ct.

Redmond, WA, 98052

U.S.A.